Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological or nationalistic flamewar. Such discussions are all the same: predictable and nasty. We're hoping to avoid them here.
You can correlate, directly, the "Western value system" with 99% of innovations in this world?
Wow! I have questions!
1. What is the west?
2. What is the homogeneous value system of the west, in its entirety?
3. What is list of the inventions this value system?
4. How do we know it was these values that generated these innovations instead of other causes?
As you might expect, I am extremely skeptical! I'm particularly curious how you're going to deal what I view as a very non homogeneous concept of "Western values" (it is news to me to hear them lumped together like that), and where you'll draw your border on "The West." For example, surely your West definition must include the Arabian peninsula, for giving us mathematics, 0, and eye surgery. Surely also it must include China for giving us gunpowder and extensive bureaucracy? Oh and Japan for innovations in education systems!
Western values: freedom of speech, the ability to remove bad leaders, etc.
IMO, all of the historical innovations you mention in the Arabian peninsula, China and Japan happened during periods of relative openness in those cultures.
Interesting - so those values existed well before our modern concept of "the west," in a place we probably wouldn't call "the west" during a period of time when "the west" was very "not open?" For example, during the dark ages, Inquisitions, etc?
Why call it "western values?" Why not just specifically refer to the values by name?
They are called “western” values because their current form began with the Enlightenment and scientific revolution in Europe and have stuck around since then. But yes they’ve popped up temporarily in other past cultures like Ancient Greece. If you know of a better name than “western values” let me know.
They are called "western values" thanks to a very eurocentric (and somewhat ignorant) view of the world that was exported thanks to colonialism.
Many of the inventions and values attributed to "Western values/culture" are derived from non western civilizations (including a tremendous amount of math/science knowledge which was imported from the east).
Propoganda and lying through ommission is quite prevalant in western accounts of history, it may require studying abroad to realize the scope of this activity.
The enlightenment as a unified event exclusively across Europe is missing a lot. Scholarship is very much identifying more complexity here and the idea that liberal democracy can be assigned to Europe and nowhere else is falling apart.
This is why it is better to use the actual names of the ideas rather than describing them with a questionable provenance.
"Liberal democracy" is a much better term than "Western values".
